Screw Esperanto. I've always felt that Spanish has the easiest spelling, fewest inconsistencies and best propensity for "saying what you mean". If we could drop the genders in Spanish, it would be the easiest language to learn, methinks.

casual disregard:I think I agree with you. Except I have never witnissed Ithkuil fail :3 I would much prefer to witness the event in real-time than to pre-suppose it must be a dead idea.

What happens when two Ithkuil speakers disagree on how to translate a word or concept? Say that you (taking the example from the article) think that gawk contains an element of surprise and I think that gawk contains an element of stupidity?

lockers:casual disregard: I think I agree with you. Except I have never witnissed Ithkuil fail :3 I would much prefer to witness the event in real-time than to pre-suppose it must be a dead idea.

While I am not a fan of not giving things a chance, I believe it's safe to assume that ithkuil is going nowhere. If you really want to give it a chance, embed it in a very successful fiction that you can world build around. Star trek gave you klingon... and I have met people who could read tolkeins what-ever-it-is-named elvish. That is probably your only chance of getting it taken seriously.

Where it could be taken seriously is in the area of language translation and speech recognition. It could be a kind of CLR for translators.

TorqueToad:How do we know this is a hate group? Did I miss something in the article? I just saw a Russian group that was interested...?

They are lead by an anti-semitic nutter who wants to create a superhuman society to help free the ukraine from their russian overlords and the global elite (jews!). The main speaker at the conference was a known terrorist who'd served time for his criminal acts.

Interesting that the story also mentioned Loglan but failed to mention the use of Loglan in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", what I consider to be RAH's best.

Interestingly, I was Renshawed back in the mid 1960's as part of a treatment for dyslexia. Seemed to work and I did become a very fast reader, although I'm not sure the T-scope was as useful as the adjustable speed reading screen - which in those days was a mechanical device that you placed over the open page of the book and was driven by a spring.

That's called metathesis. Happens a lot. For example, in classical Greek, I have is ekho. I will have should be ekhso, but it's eskho. Another example: Bird used to be pronounce brid. And Germans say Ross (short for hross) instead of horse.

"On a warm afternoon in mid-July, I visited Quijada's modest three-bedroom home in suburban Sacramento, where he lives with his wife, Carol Barry, also a retired civil servant..."

That's a sweeter deal than tenure, I am sure.

Constructed or natural, language is arbitrary. If natural languages are arbitrary, and he is building upon a framework based of natural languages, then his creation i is just as arbitrary as any other language. He's not created a language from scratch, just borrowed concepts and categories translated from his own linguistic framework into what his cultural/mental maps deem as "more precise". His idea of precision might be your complete inelegant sloppiness.

The really precise language was probably howled by the wild boy of Aveyron.

/I was a linguistics major, and the amount of egotistical puffery with the field, the Chomsky/Pinker fellation, the chicken/egg arguments, the hyping it up into a being a "real" science, as something mathematically rigorous and exact, plus the grad student brain sucking thievery of academia, etc...made me glad to graduate.

Fark Rye For Many Whores:No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin

Yes

, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

No. See that's not fair to every other language in the world, to choose the two weirdest (ok and French) languges. I'm not saying every other language makes sense (IANAL) but obviously the intense colonial/trade/exploration/science contacts have made those languages a mess.

You must forgive me, but I feel like that's a small apology for nudity. I realize we can't account for everything!

casual disregard:Submitter here. I actually felt my heart break when I noticed Ithkuil had been embraced by terrorists.

Part of me, saying this as a USA citizen, wants to found a "daughter" country of the USA just to prove it's possible. And in doing so there would be two official languages: English would be spoken and written and Ithkuil would be the lingua franca. Or, I suppose, the lingua ithkuil.

on the road:casual disregard: Imagine a society in which English is the primary spoken and written language, except Ithkuil is the language of law. Nobody speaks Ithkuil except for practice.

You have all the advantages of English metaphor and all the advantages of Ithkuil specificity. Imagine spoken English language hand-in-hand with a written Ithkuil Constitution. Literally the best of both worlds.

I understand the point, but it leaves a huge gulf between the written and spoken language, like Chinese. People literally have to learn two separate languages to both speak and write.

For one thing, it promotes illiteracy. Mastering written Chinese is a herculean task that was crystalized in practices like the mandarin examinations. It tends to absorb effort that could be channeled into more practical or fulfilling ends.

For a country to establish spoken English and written Ithkuil as official languages would be worse than simply using Chinese. Since the languages are separate in structure, anything spoken that has to be written down is subject to misunderstanding and mischief. Contracts and legislation would suddenly require a two-step process to accomplish anything meaningful that represents the original intent.

That is an excellent point which I cannot answer. I would hope that the crystalline structure of Ithkuil would overtake the problem. But successful implementation would require good faith. Can we guarantee good faith on an inherently unfaithful format of communication? Before we answer, let's remember that the first group to acknowledge Ithkuil seriously was a hate group.

Graffito:casual disregard: I think I agree with you. Except I have never witnissed Ithkuil fail :3 I would much prefer to witness the event in real-time than to pre-suppose it must be a dead idea.

What happens when two Ithkuil speakers disagree on how to translate a word or concept? Say that you (taking the example from the article) think that gawk contains an element of surprise and I think that gawk contains an element of stupidity?

I think that is a fair criticism. I suppose the idea is that Ithkuil is rigidly defined and rigidly enforced. I don't know how specifically you could prevent it from deforming or devolving. It's the sort of language which has no native speakers by default and therefore has no rules to break as a result.

cig-mkr:Ebonics, or "African American Vernacular English" just seemed to me to be an excuse for a poor command of the English language. It's probably just the way it was presented and how the media hammered it to death.

Actually, my understanding was that by classifying "Ebonics" as different language, schools could get ESL (English as a Second Language) grants to teach them how to speak English. Schools in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods were getting extra money to teach their students how to speak English, and the schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods wanted a piece of that action too.

Ironically, the black community got their panties in a wad about this, played the race card, and effectively screwed themselves out of a nice chunk of federal grant money for their kids.

Mawson of the Antarctic:After listening to so many people today biatch and moan on both sides of the Instagram debate, it's refreshing to read something of actual substance.

/language enthusiast, etymology fan

If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ("GEB" for short) or Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. He wrote some pretty interesting stuff about translation. One of the the points he made was that the shorter a piece of text is, the harder it is to translate it well. Thus, he concludes, the title of a longer work is often the most difficult part of the work to translate, since it encapsulates so much meaning into so little text.

One example that I think illustrates this point is a short story written in Spanish titled "Nosotras." The word "nosotras" is the feminine first person plural; it's used when everyone being referred to is female. I guess you could translate it as "We, the Women" or "Us Females." In the story, the fact that every character (to whom the title refers) is female turns out to be a significant plot point. But in English, a translated title like "We, the Women" overstresses that point. There just isn't a simple way in English to convey the point of the title without bludgeoning the reader over the head with it.

lockers:So what happens when it becomes a living language and morphs into a flawed, yet serviceable language like all the rest. In theory, people using Ithkuil will change the way they use language. In practice, people will change Ithkuil as they use it. A lot of English's written oddities has to do with the great vowel migration (a political event) happening after the formalization of the written language. That messy people problem is what caused all practical languages to be less than ideal. Given that, why is this language "better" than english? Considering we have damn near universal literacy in the first world, and a majority a literate worldwide, what exactly is the benefit that is immune to the people using it problem?

It was pointed out to me in a book that trying to make a phonetic language for an alphabet is a losing proposition for two reasons: first, that languages have multiple dialects, and second, that the pronunciation of words changes over time. Take the infamous English phrase "park the car in Harvard Yard" for example. If there is only one correct way to spell it, but you use a phonetic alphabet, then there is only one "correct" way to pronounce it and all other dialects are "wrong." Who's going to decide which dialect of English is the sole "correct" one?

I think I first read this in "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker, but I'm not sure.

Dr.Zom:Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can't be formed without providing what linguists refer to as "evidentiality," inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.

English need this.

Cool article, subby, thanks.

Actually, English has more evidentiality built into it than native speakers realize. To give one example, think of WILL versus GOING TO. The difference between "It will rain tomorrow" and "It's going to rain tomorrow" is evidentiality.

One thing I love about the Nepali language is how it does evidentiality, especially the "hearsay particle" "re" (think "ray of sunshine" for pronunciation). It rougly translates as "X said that" or "according to X."

So the pseudo-Nepali sentence "Mary is beautiful, John-ray" translates into "John said that Mary is beautiful" or "John thinks that Mary is beautiful." It's such a useful little monosyllable. You can even leave off specifying WHO said it, so it becomes a more general "They say that" or "It is said that":

Don't Tongue the Reaper!:Dr.Zom: Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can't be formed without providing what linguists refer to as "evidentiality," inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay.

English need this.

Cool article, subby, thanks.

Quechua has a similar evidentiality. I know this personally, I am not speaking from hearsay :)

But does Quechua have a "hearsay particle" for evidentiality like Nepali does?

Oznog:Consequently many of the BASE words got deprecated because they couldn't be distinguished from the negated form. For example, "evitable" and "clement" are words, but rarer if not deprecated. If you said "inevitable" or "inclement" with a lot of common-speech accents, the "n" sound is often short and can be absent but the word may be assumed to be "inevitable" or "inclement" even in the lack of contextual clues, unless the surrounding enunciation context is so bold and clear that its absence would be noted.

Frankie Landau-Banks would like a word with you about neglected positives. I think she's a bit gruntled. Also

CitizenTed:Screw Esperanto. I've always felt that Spanish has the easiest spelling, fewest inconsistencies and best propensity for "saying what you mean". If we could drop the genders in Spanish, it would be the easiest language to learn, methinks.

Correction: It's easy to learn pidgin Spanish. It's NOT easy to learn real Spanish. The grammar is remarkably more difficult to master than most people realize.

If the level of fluency you're looking for is "Please give me a glass of water" and "How much do the sunglasses cost?" then, sure, it's easy. If you want to appreciate Pablo Neruda, then it's a very different story.

KarmicDisaster:I'd be very surprised if the average right wing hater could learn this. I mean study it out.

"Right Wing" (and "conservative") are shifty terms. Just to point out something not necessarily obvious, the "nationalist" terrorist groups in what use to be the old SU are mostly out-of-work Communists who are beating the nationalistic drum to gain support.

So if the particular koolaid meme you're slavishly repeating is "All right wing people are drooling morons" it may not particularly apply here.

"Right Wing" (and "conservative") are shifty terms. Just to point out something not necessarily obvious, the "nationalist" terrorist groups in what use to be the old SU are mostly out-of-work Communists who are beating the nationalistic drum to gain support.

So if the particular koolaid meme you're slavishly repeating is "All right wing people are drooling morons" it may not particularly apply here.

"Right Wing" (and "conservative") are shifty terms. Just to point out something not necessarily obvious, the "nationalist" terrorist groups in what use to be the old SU are mostly out-of-work Communists who are beating the nationalistic drum to gain support.

So if the particular koolaid meme you're slavishly repeating is "All right wing people are drooling morons" it may not particularly apply here.

That might be true if the nationalists in question weren't also stridently anti-communist. In this case, the almost cultish group adopting the language is pro-white, pro-Slav/Rus, anti-Jew, anti-Israel, etc. It's hard to imagine a less right-wing organization. You might well be projecting your own hopes and fears onto the other side. Have you ever considered that?

lantawa:Well, because this is Fark, here's the world's compendium of swear words in all languages, starting with Tagalog

It is not safe for work

http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Tagalog+%28Philippine%29

I see that your website has a Nepali page, and includes my favorite Nepali swear word, "Chickne."

When I lived in Nepal, I had a Peace Corps friend who was in training to become a math teacher, and he was working with some younger kids, doing practice teaching. Since he was still in training, the trainer (who was fluent in both Nepali and English) was in the classroom observing his lesson. The subject was addition, and my friend delivered the lesson in his best Nepali.

My friend divided the students into groups of four and gave each group a box of matches. As he was telling the students what to do, he gave the instruction "Remove the matches from the box," but he mispronounced the verb for "remove." The Nepali verb he wanted was "Jickne," but what he actually said was "Chickne." The students burst out laughing.

Later, my friend asked the trainer why the students had laughed. The trainer explained that he had used the verb "Chickne" when he should have said "Jickne." "Chickne" is a vulgar word meaning "to copulate" or "to have six with." So instead of saying, "Remove the matches from the box," what he had actually told the children was, "Fark the matches in the box"!

/Then there's the American tourist who went into a bar intended to ask for a pisco sour, but accidentally asked for a "pico sour" instead.// http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisco_sour/// "Pico" is Chilean slang for "penis"

That's called metathesis. Happens a lot. For example, in classical Greek, I have is ekho. I will have should be ekhso, but it's eskho. Another example: Bird used to be pronounce brid. And Germans say Ross (short for hross) instead of horse.

Anyone know of any good resources for a budding language/linguistics enthusiast, either online or actual book?

Wikipedia is pretty cool actually. Try skimming through the descriptions of obscure languages, like Akan (Twi), Georgian (Kartveli) etc. There's lots of good stuff about Sanskrit too. The list is endless. You'll bump into a lot of things you never heard of like "tone terracing", "polysynthesis" and "circumfixing" etc etc.Then explore from there. The good thing is you can do it at your own speed.

Well, that was a depressing, albeit interesting, read. It sometimes seems there exists no work so innocent and so crafted with the finest intentions but that will find perverse application in the hands of some batshiat kooks.

Isildur:Well, that was a depressing, albeit interesting, read. It sometimes seems there exists no work so innocent and so crafted with the finest intentions but that will find perverse application in the hands of some batshiat kooks.

casual disregard:The idea is supposedly that the language is not intended to be spoken. It is intended to be perfect code.

Imagine a society in which English is the primary spoken and written language, except Ithkuil is the language of law. Nobody speaks Ithkuil except for practice.

You have all the advantages of English metaphor and all the advantages of Ithkuil specificity. Imagine spoken English language hand-in-hand with a written Ithkuil Constitution. Literally the best of both worlds.

What you have is another barrier between people who actually understand what the law says or shoudl say and what the average person thinks the law says/or wants it to say.